Native Tongue

Chapter Twenty-one

Michaela woke before dawn, with a pounding headache, drenched in an icy sweat. Before the soft tone of the Household alarm that roused everyone — unless sick or given some special dispensation — at five o’clock in the morning. Here in the depths of the hill that sheltered Chornyak Household there was nothing else to wake you… no light filtered in here below the earth, except in the long halls that ran down either side of the building, where there was some illumination from the ground floor skylights extending the full length of both halls. And there was no sound… no birdsong, no thunder, no traffic from the streets or skies, nothing. It was absolutely still, and absolutely dark. And except in the dormitories the linguists had constructed the sleepingrooms to offer the maximum possible amount of soundproofing; it was, after all, the only privacy there was within the houses of the Lines.

If the couple who had the room next to yours chose to while away the night in erotic pleasures or forbidden rituals — something Michaela could not imagine in the linguists, who seemed to her almost excruciatingly proper, almost puritanical, but then you never knew — you would never know about it. You would never hear a moan, a gasp of pleasure, an obscene incantation, even a scream of ecstasy at orgasm. The builders of these houses had insisted on that, and it had been very wise of them.

But with the dreams that had been tormenting her nights lately, Michaela needed nothing to wake her, not even the alarm. The dreams were more than sufficient. Dreams in which each of the men she had killed lined up before her and held out imploring arms, begging for their lives back, whimpering pitifully like babies trapped in cellars or small animals caught in fences… She shuddered, and threw back her damp sheets, loathing the feel of them against her skin.

It was so ridiculous, damn it! Except for Ned Landry — and by God, she would kill him again in an instant, if she were given the chance — every one of those men had gone peacefully and probably gratefully to his grave. Every last one had been at the end of a long and fruitful life of hard work; every one had reached that stage of life where none of the physiological systems could really be counted on any longer, and the body began to betray the embarrassed spirit; every one of them had been more than ready for some rest. Rest she had given them. Painlessly. Sweet rest.

Grandfather Verdi, for instance. It was absurd that she should dream of him begging for his life back! He had been so anxious, in a completely healthy way, to be rid of it.

“Like a baby, that’s what,” he would grumble. “Like a baby! Diaper me and bathe me and oil me and powder me, powder me and diaper me like a baby! And feed me baby food, too, filthy stuff! No way for a man to go on, Mrs. Landry, no proper way at all! Bunch of flaming damnfool, that’s what it is!” And he would tug furiously at the diapers that shamed him so, and toss on his pillows, and curse the magnificent genetic heritage that tied him to a world he was good and sick of… he would not have been asking for that life back. He would have been thanking her for the blessing of release. And it was the same with the others.

Except for Ned. And as for Ned… if she had dreamed only of him, groveling and begging and pleading for mercy, she would have positively enjoyed it. She hoped he was burning in hell. Slowly. With some devil always keeping him waiting. She did not regret having killed Ned Landry, any more than she regretted it when she destroyed a polio virus with a vaccine for the children. Same sort of filth, same sort of pestilence, same sort of service to humanity, getting rid of Ned Landry. She was staunchly glad she’d done that.

But the others? It was absurd, and she knew it was absurd, and still they haunted her nights. Even though they were all men. Even though they were all Lingoes. Even though, by rights, they deserved killing.

Pain lanced through her head with the thought, and she smiled grimly into it… you deserved that, Michaela! Because you are a liar. You are a liar, all the way from your head to your toes. THEY DESERVED KILLING… You know better now. And that was the problem. She thought she had escaped from the problem when she left Barren House and redefined her targeted victims so that they would always be only male linguists, but she had been wrong.

Paul John Chornyak, for example. Ninety-five years old. At an age where death would be no more surprising than the sun coming up in the mornings. A bit of a nuisance to Thomas and the other senior men, because he’d once been Head and couldn’t forget it, insisting on attending meetings and being part of the business decisions of the Line. Not that his mind wasn’t still sharp, it was; but his memory wasn’t what it had been, and his patience was a toddler’s patience. She served his meals away from the communal diningroom now, except for Sunday dinner and holiday meals and the odd occasion when he just suddenly decided that he by damn did not wish to eat alone in his room. And even that happened only in the evenings, when he was like most very old people and knew he faced a nearly sleepless night… he hadn’t really needed any sleep to speak of for years, and he got bored waiting for morning. It made him petulant, and he would sometimes insist on going to the diningroom for his evening meal just to cut into the span of the endless evenings and nights. Breakfast, though, and lunch — those Michaela served him in his room, staying with him if he wanted her, listening to him talk. Which meant that any day, any day at all, she could ease him on his way as she had eased the others on, ridding the burdened world of one more linguist.

But she loved the old man.

That brought her wide awake; and she lay there staring at the ceiling, shocked at her own thoughts. It was true. She loved him. She had loved Grandfather Verdi, too; she knew that now. She loved the old women at Barren House. She loved Nazareth Chornyak, whose face she’d begun to seek out first whenever she went into a room where linguists were; she knew she made excuses to touch Nazareth as she passed her, to brush an imaginary thread from her tunic or straighten an imaginary wrinkle… to rub aching muscles after a day of difficult work… yes, she loved Nazareth as well. It seemed to Michaela suddenly that she was running over, brimful and running over, with love. For Lingoes! For filthy, effing Lingoes, unspeakable Lingoes, that she’d hated all her life as did any decent citizen, that had taken her baby and killed it and given her a hunk of metal in exchange… Where had all that love come from? She had not known she had it in her, that ability to love.

Thomas, now, she felt no love for, any more than she’d felt love for Ned. She had turned her attention to convincing him that he had seduced her, because she knew his power and respected it and she knew no other way to make use of it. But she felt no love for the man. Loving someone who considered you only one small notch above a cleverly trained domestic animal, and made no secret of it — that is, loving any adult male — was not possible for her. It would be a perversion, loving your masters while their boots were on your neck, and she was a woman healthy of mind. Like most women she had suffered one violent case of the Romantic Love that everyone learned about in Homeroom and had spoonfed to them (with a giant spoon) by the media. When she was very young. And like most women, that one case had cured her for life.

It had been her good fortune that it had happened to her before she met the man she was to marry, sparing her the soul-destroying experience of “falling in love” — and then out of love again — with her own husband. She serviced Thomas, as she had serviced Ned, and she had no reason to believe she’d lost her touch. Thomas would never be like Ned, never a fool, never swift-melting putty in a woman’s hands, no. But she worked at it very hard, and she was extremely careful; she knew that she was as nearly indispensable to Thomas now as it was possible for any woman to be, with such a man. As indispensable as poor Rachel, at least; probably more so. And he would be wondering where she was — it was past time for her to be seen up and about her duties.

“I’m tired,” she said aloud. “I’m absolutely worn out. I cannot get out of this bed and go upstairs and be a nice lady.” After which, of course, she stood up, stripped the bed of its sheets for the laundryroom, pulled on a robe for her definitely necessary trip to the nearest shower room, and headed out into the corridor to begin her day. At least in the daytime she was too busy to be haunted by her row of little old ghosts, with Ned as their token youngster. She shut the nonsensical plaints of her victims up in her room along with her bone-weariness, and went gracefully about her business.

She was very late; when she reached the diningroom it was nearly empty. All the children had gone long since, and even the section where the adults ate was thinly populated. Mostly by the very senior men, who no longer went out on negotiations, and who reminded her unpleasantly of what she’d only just put out of her mind. She stood in the doorway trying to decide where she should sit and seriously considering skipping breakfast altogether. She could go straight on to Barren House, where they’d give her a cup of good tea and some fresh-baked bread, and where she could count on good company and good conversation. Versus sitting with one of these men and being told what the world was coming to and how it was all the fault of either the President or the women, depending on which had most recently irritated the old gentleman in question.

There was a touch on her arm, and she jumped; she hadn’t heard whoever it was coming up behind her. Clingsoles were wonderful for a house with scores of busy people coming and going; they kept down the racket. But they gave you no warning that someone was near you, which could be inconvenient at times.

It was Nazareth who had touched her, though, and that was a note of hope at last in this otherwise miserable morning.

“Natha,” she said. “You’re late.”

“So are you. Disgustingly late. Come have breakfast with me, and we can be disgustingly late together.”

“Here?”

“Of course not here. Come on, I happen to know that there’s a health crisis at Barren House that demands our immediate attention, Nurse Landry. I’ll vouch for it if necessary. You don’t want to eat with those old creakers, do you?”

“Not particularly,” Michaela admitted. “But I expect I ought to do it anyway. Sort of a public health service.”

“No, you come along with me, I need you worse than they do; I feel this terrible pain coming on,” said Nazareth. And before anything more could be said she had moved Michaela out the door, across the atrium — where the latest A.I.R.’s had not yet come out of their privacy area, which meant nothing at all to be seen there — and through the service rooms onto the street. Nazareth wasted no time in anything she did, and years of experience with her brood of nine had given her a firm way of bustling another person along that was impressive even to a professional nurse who did professional person-bustling. At the slidewalk, Michaela applied the brakes, both to catch her breath and for the principle of the thing.

“Hey!” she protested, laughing. “It’s too early for running! I wasn’t brought up jogging and hoeing before daybreak like you mad linguists — could we walk now? Please?”

“We could. But I had to get outside before someone saw me and invented an emergency for me.”

“They do that, do they? I suppose that’s why I see you here at the big house so rarely.”

“Absolutely right,” said Nazareth. “My father devoutly believes that a linguist not in use is a linguist being wasted, and he allows no linguist to be wasted. I stop by very early to see whichever of my kidlings happens to be around, and then I hightail it back home.”

Home. That would be Barren House.

“You could get caught, going by the diningroom,” Michaela noted.

“Yes… but how else was I to get your attention? I assure you that if I stood in the atrium and shouted at you I would definitely get caught. It was safer to slip in and grab you, you perceive.”

The walk had started to turn into a jog again, and Michaela knew Nazareth couldn’t help it; hurrying was as natural to her as eating and drinking. But she stopped, and reached out to turn the other woman round to face her.

“Let me take a look at you,” she said, holding Nazareth firmly with a hand on each shoulder. “No, Nazareth, don’t go tugging away from me! I’m not at all sure you’re well… perhaps I should suggest to your father that you spend another few days at the hospital, since it’s so pleasant there? Hold still, woman, so that I can see you! They’ll still feed us, if we don’t get to Barren House till noon — hold still.”

Nazareth smiled at her, declaring that she gave up, and Michaela looked her over thoroughly in the morning light; it was more reliable than indoor light. Still much too thin, she thought. Much too thin. Tall as she was, a good four inches taller than Michaela, the gauntness was still obvious. Especially in the plain tunics she wore. Her hipbones stuck out, still.

“I won’t eat more,” announced Nazareth with determination, reading her mind. “Don’t bother instructing me, Nurse. I eat enough already. I have always been a gawk — just ask my erstwhile husband — and I am not going to change to one of those motherly types at my advanced age.”

“Hush,” said Michaela, and laid a gentle finger to Nazareth’s lips, getting a kiss for her trouble; she moved her hands to trace the stark cheekbones, and narrowed her eyes to study the face of this self-proclaimed gawk. Yes, she was too thin; but the look of intolerable strain was gone. There was a touch of color in her cheeks, her eyes glowed with the beginnings of health, and she had let her hair down from that vicious knot she’d always worn it in and put it in a single braid down her back.

“Really, Nazareth,” Thomas had commented the first time he’d seen the change of hairstyle. “At your age.” Michaela was delighted that Nazareth had ignored him.

“You look better, Nazareth,” she said, finally satisfied. “So much better.”

“I am better, that’s why. Nothing like chopping away all the dead wood and decay at one whack to improve the basic structure.”

“When I remember how you looked in the hospital that day…”

“Don’t remember,” advised Nazareth sensibly. “Don’t think of it. You think of the past too much… it’s not good for you.”

And how did she know that? Michaela stared at her, thinking how dear she was, and Nazareth clucked her tongue at her.

“Could we go on now, do you suppose?” she demanded, pretending to be cross. “If you’re through with inspection? I’m willing to eat, if you’d give me half a chance. And I happen to know that Susannah made spice bread this morning, Michaela.”

“It’ll all be gone.”

“If you keep us standing here like this, it certainly will.”

Michaela took her hand, and they hurried, cutting across the greenspace and leaving disapproving glances behind them from the pedestrians standing sedately on the slidewalks. They would think she was a Lingoe, too — it crossed Michaela’s mind as she stretched her legs to keep up with Nazareth’s brisk stride, and she marveled that it did not bother her. What bothered her was the prospect of missing out on Susannah’s pulitzer among spice cakes.

She had a long and busy day, and she gave no more mental space to her dreams; she was occupied with the living. And when she got back to Chornyak Household in midafternoon, ready to make her daily report to Thomas — a farce, but their most discreet opportunity to make arrangements for the nights, and therefore observed punctiliously — she found the house hushed and a message from Thomas that she should not go to his office that day.

“Is something wrong, Clara?” she asked, surprised; Thomas never omitted her “report” if he was in the house, because he was determined that it should be looked upon as an unchangeable item in his daily schedule. “It’s awfully quiet… has something happened?”

“It’s Father, child,” Clara said.

Paul John? Michaela would have run, then, answering the call like an old fire horse answering an alarm, but Clara caught her wrist and held her fast.

“It’s no use, child, and there’s no need for you to go,” said the other woman. “He’s gone — and everything’s been seen to.”

“But why wasn’t I called? He’s my patient! Why didn’t someone send for me, Clara? I was only at Barren House!”

“Michaela, dear child, my father had come down to make a pest of himself in the computer room — ” Clara began.

“Oh heaven, your father… and I am standing here complaining at you! Oh, Clara…”

Clara patted her hand and went right on. “He’d taken it into his head that there was something he wanted changed in one of the tax programs, and he was standing there talking, telling them how they were doing it all wrong and he wouldn’t tolerate it — and he just went, child. In the middle of a phrase. It couldn’t have been easier.”

“But — ”

“And,” Clara continued, “we women were seeing to our dead many and many a long year before ever we had a nurse in this house. There was no need to disturb you.”

“I’m sorry, Clara,” Michaela said softly. “Of course there wasn’t. When did this happen?”

“Oh, perhaps an hour ago, dear. I’m sure someone’s gone over to Barren House with the news by this time… it’s not the sort of thing we announce on the intercoms… but you must have just missed them.”

Michaela drew a long breath, and realized that she was shivering. She was ashamed of herself.

“Clara, I’m so sorry,” she said again.

“Don’t be, my dear; Father was ninety-five, you know. It was to be expected, and I’m not grieving. If he’d been sick, now; if he’d suffered — that would have been another thing entirely. But this was just as he would have wanted it. He died right in the middle of telling someone what to do. It’s all right. Really.”

Michaela tried to smile, and then Clara was gone, saying something about arrangements to be made, and she could, blessedly, sit down at last. She was as weak as if she’d been tapped like a tree, and all her blood drained away. And she knew why. It wasn’t grief, though Paul John had mattered greatly to her; Clara was right that he had died as he would have preferred to die. It was because of what she had thought the instant Clara told her, what had come into her mind the instant she heard the news.

OH THANK GOD, NOW I WILL NOT HAVE TO KILL HIM.

That is what she had thought. She was sick with relief, and sick at her relief. She stayed there a long time, in the unusual stillness of the house, wondering what sort of wickedness wound on itself she nurtured.

After a while a message came through on her wrist computer, from Thomas. Unfortunate incident, but not unexpected, etc. Michaela’s services would, however, still be needed, etc. She was expected to continue in her position… he would meet with her the following day to discuss the necessary changes in her duties, etc.

Michaela acknowledged the message. And then, when she was sure she could walk without trembling, she went to her room.